


For Me

by Anonymous



Series: Sam Gets Policed [3]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Colonialism, Gen, Introspection, Masturbation, Metafiction, Moral Dilemmas, Police Brutality, Racism, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:14:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28471488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Confronted over his story's themes, Sam begins spiraling. (Or: How To Be A Bad Minority)
Series: Sam Gets Policed [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2084622
Comments: 6
Kudos: 8
Collections: Anonymous





	For Me

Sam stared at the message on his screen.

It was the first negative comment he’d received on that particular story. Of course, he wasn’t under any illusions that it was the first negative _sentiment_ his story had garnered, but it was the first time that anyone had gone out of their way to confront him about it.

The message came from a user called ‘KnifeliX’ and expressed disbelief that anyone in their right mind would post a story like Sam’s. There was a thinly veiled implication that the story was going to perpetuate the very injustices its content warnings implied, and a final condemnation of him as a racist.

They were strange accusations to process.

The initial idea for the story had come to him by chance. It wasn’t one he’d ever considered before, but when it was presented to him, practically gift-wrapped, he couldn’t get it out of his head.

The idea hinged on its characters: A policeman and someone who, if Sam was being honest, he’d created for the sole purpose of projecting onto. The plot, or what little of it he developed, played out like the sleaziest of porn. At its core, the final story had to do with power— an imbalance of it, an abuse of it, and an absence of it.

Race was undeniably involved. Sam would go as far as to say that it was the whole point. Ignoring its presence in that kind of plot, between those specific character types, seemed like a disservice to the real-world issue he was exploring.

From a young age, his parents had told him about their home country. They told him about its beauty, and they told him about its dismantling. He heard about the beatings in the streets, the oppression of the people, and the utter carnage that a newly militarized police force carried out. When he was older, he learned details about the various tortures that occurred. A few were so horrifying that he’d felt unsettled for days.

Distrust of the police ran in Sam’s blood and lived in his bones. He saw that their institutionalized violence wasn’t limited to a foreign country, thousands of miles away in time and space. No, it was very much present in his own country, neither out of sight nor out of mind.

He knew what he looked like to them.

He was an Other.

In fact, he’d always been an Other.

Growing up in a rural town, he’d been surrounded by people he didn’t look like. As a child, he’d never thought too deeply about it. Even when he started attending school, equipped with nothing but the little English he’d picked up from Sesame Street reruns, he hadn’t fully realized what being an Other meant.

“ _I don’t understand what you’re saying_ ,” a classmate had once proclaimed before running off, leaving Sam confused. He’d understood his classmate perfectly, so how could his classmate not understand him back?

Maybe Sam hadn’t said the words right. They were simple words, but he supposed he just needed more practice.

Familiarizing himself with English was a complex, ongoing process. Every time he thought he could speak it as naturally as if it were his first language, he was inevitably proven wrong.

Now and then, he rewatched movies he’d seen countless times, with dialogue he’d practically memorized the sound of, only to realize that he’d never actually understood a great deal of it.

He wondered if his English-speaking peers had understood. Perhaps the movies were intended for a slightly older audience and used vocabulary to match. Or perhaps it was entirely a failing on Sam’s part, a possibility which made him question his grasp on the language each time it happened.

Despite his doubts, he never asked about it. He didn’t need to highlight his own failings, if that’s what they were. He was an Other, and in the eyes of some people, that was already one failing too many.

A member of his elementary school’s staff had once tried to get his attention by asking if he spoke English. At the time, Sam had taken it in stride. He knew he was quiet—occasionally to the point of coming across as absent-minded—and asking people whether they understood the common tongue could perhaps be considered a ‘joke’.

But he never forgot it. Years passed and the memory would return to him at the oddest moments. He never did find out how it’d been intended, and maybe that was why it stuck so much, the uncertainty.

Then again, there was no uncertainty in the way his mother and her friend had been urged to ‘speak English’ by a passing stranger on the street, but that stuck just as well.

His heart hurt when she’d told him.

When he was eleven and a friend laughed at his botched pronunciation of a word, he took it upon himself to never repeat the mistake. When he was fourteen, a different friend questioned whether he was actually bilingual.

“ _How can you speak Spanish if you don’t know all the words?”_

While Sam was confident in his vocabulary, he wouldn’t presume to know every word in either English or Spanish, and so had a tendency to err on the side of caution.

When he was seventeen, he came across an online quiz designed to assess his proficiency in English. It began by asking whether English was his first language. By then, he’d considered it so for a long time, but since it technically wasn’t, he checked off the box marked ‘no’.

What followed was a wall of random words and the instruction to select only the ones whose definition he was _absolutely positive_ of.

Fortunately, he was fairly sure he knew most of them. Or he thought he did. How could he really be sure, when words’ meanings became muddled and distorted through popular use, and he’d learned a considerable number of them solely through context clues in conversation and literature?

And so he was cautious, only selecting the ones he was surest of and leaving the rest—all those whose meanings he’d only ever inferred—completely untouched.

Upon finishing the quiz, he was cheerfully informed that he’d scored relatively high for a non-native speaker, though still lower than quiz-takers who’d marked English as their first language.

A year later, when an assignment involved him recording himself and watching back the footage in class, he realized he still had an accent.

But an accent of _what_ , he wasn’t sure. He didn’t sound like the Spanish-speaking characters on TV, the loud ones who emphasized vowels and sometimes interjected Spanish terms into English sentences. He sounded different.

He sounded Other.

It helped him understand a phenomenon that he’d witnessed throughout his childhood. He’d had few playmates like himself, and just as few opportunities to socialize with them. Meetings with relatives and family friends were sporadic, but even so, Sam noticed a shift over the years.

Gradually at first, but then all at once, his childhood playmates made an effort to forget Spanish.

Sam didn’t understand why. What could a person gain by losing a language? _Purposely_ losing it, no less! Their parents still spoke Spanish, so it had to be a matter of willful effort.

Eventually, Sam understood. He didn’t think the perceived benefits outweighed the loss, but he understood. How much sooner would he have lost his accent if he didn’t speak Spanish on a daily basis? How much more confident would he become if he considered English his first and only language?

But none of that would change what he looked like.

He’d still get asked the same questions, only that he’d be unable to answer most of them. He’d still be held to a higher standard and looked at with suspicion despite never stepping a single toe out of line. He’d still be treated as unjustly as if he never gave up Spanish.

Sometimes, it wasn’t even the negatives that got under his skin, but the positives. More accurately put, the illusion of them.

He couldn’t help the inkling of hope that bloomed in his chest whenever a friend asked him to teach them Spanish. And yet, time and time again, it rapidly became clear that learning his true first language, the language of his family, was nothing more than whimsy on their part.

“ _Where are you from?”_ was far less emotionally taxing in comparison.

Sam found himself frowning down at KnifeliX’s accusatory message.

The website he uploaded his stories to was known for welcoming all manner of erotica, from the mundane to the bizarre. In the grand scheme of things, the story KnifeliX messaged him about probably fell into the latter category, but not by very much. Sam had certainly posted about more extreme acts.

Then, if it wasn’t the act that KnifeliX objected to, it had to be the circumstances. Institutionalized racism, abuse of power.

Sam hadn’t meant for the story to be taken as anything but that, a story. He’d readily admit that there was an element of social commentary to it, but its primary purpose had always been titillation. If he wanted to open a broader discussion, he would’ve posted it elsewhere, or written it differently.

As it was, he’d taken care to list out the story’s warnings in the hope that only interested readers would engage with it. He had no wish to get his stories in front of more eyes than necessary. First and foremost, they were for him, and on occasion, for readers like him.

He wondered if KnifeliX was like him.

Had KnifeliX grown up in similar circumstances? Or spent their whole life harboring a deep unease for atrocities within the realm of possibility? Did they avoid police, despite knowing their avoidance only made them more suspicious? Were they like Sam, who would always be suspicious regardless of what he did or didn’t do?

Was there a specific kind of fear ingrained in their very bones?

From the looks of it, that was the only way KnifeliX could be like him. The only other way was refuted by the message itself.

Sam had unusual inclinations, ones it had taken him time to fully comprehend, but the safest manner of exploring them had become his writing. He’d seen plenty of arguments over the method— people who didn’t understand, or who thought there were things better left unsaid.

But Sam already left so much unsaid, he had to get _some_ things out. If nothing else, he hoped his stories would reach others like him, people who understood.

KnifeliX didn’t seem to understand. That was fine.

Sam took a breath and composed his reply.

**Locus:  
** **I apologize if seeing the story’s warnings upset you, as that was not my intention in listing them out. My reasons for writing it are my own, but I can assure you that I wouldn’t write this way about something I didn’t personally share a connection with.**

With that, he shut off his computer and went to bed.

* * *

He awoke to a second message from KnifeliX.

This time, they insisted that any connection Sam had to the situation—including sharing the victimized character’s ethnicity—meant nothing in light of how he’d written about it. No one was exempt from harboring racist tendencies, the message said. Not even against their own.

Sam knew that.

He _knew_ — partly because, as he’d grown up, his parents had consistently assured him that his Indigenous roots were something to be proud of.

Once, when he was far too young to remember, his parents had taken him to visit his Indigenous relatives. It was a way for him to see their way of life and, at least in passing, reconnect with that part of himself.

Well, he’d always enjoyed nature, but he’d be hard-pressed to call that an inherited trait.

Instead, he inherited knowledge.

He learned about Indigenous struggles the world over, of both his people and others, and about the atrocities—past and present—that Thanksgiving seemed designed to overshadow.

Neither he nor his family celebrated it, and in moments of self-reflection, he could admit to himself that its continued popularity left him deeply uncomfortable. It was a discomfort that rose to the forefront of his thoughts on a yearly basis. Friends who casually mentioned it served as an infallible reminder of how little the world cared about its history.

Sam could still remember his first grade teacher’s insistence on dividing their class into ‘pilgrims and Indians’, and his subsequent sorting into the former group. He imagined that she’d wanted to be politically correct, or what passed for it back then— surely it would be racist to condemn him to Indianhood solely because he was an Other?

But... He was.

He was an Other and a descendant of the so-called ‘Indians’ found across the Americas, peoples who’d been reduced to Others through sheer force of will, through rapes and massacres and systemic violence maintained for hundreds of years.

Genocide.

Colorism and classism intertwined into something that could be found across Latin American society. It took different forms depending on the specific country, and though by no means its sole targets, Indigenous peoples were generally on the receiving end.

Benign examples were found on TV. Newscasters with European features and bleached hair. Politicians with blue eyes and Germanic surnames. Light-skinned celebrities and suspiciously uniform selections of ‘random’ interviewees off the street.

Less benign was his people being shot down. Dark skin, Indigenous or otherwise, seen as undesirable. Languages lost, with mere scraps of them integrated into regional dialects. Limited job opportunities and inescapable poverty.

There was a measure of distrust that came with his heritage.

Sam knew he was a cautious person. He was cautious to an extent that most people weren’t, to an extent that he’d be a fundamentally different person if he wasn’t. And yet, he still thought that some types of distrust were—if not innate to, then expected in—marginalized groups.

He was cautious around most people. Whenever he interacted with anyone less familiar than a friend, his lack of social skills manifested as an undercurrent of awkwardness. It wasn’t debilitating, but it was just enough to throw him off every time.

That wasn’t the same undercurrent he felt when interacting with certain people.

‘Trust your instincts,’ said common sense. ‘They pick up on the things you don’t.’

He had no idea what things his instincts might possibly pick up on. All he knew was that sometimes, when he spoke with those people, his instincts screamed at him.

_You’re not welcome_.

It always left an impression that lasted long after the conversation had finished. Fortunately, he rarely needed to speak to those people again, which spared him the repeated discomfort of feeling so viscerally unwelcome.

His instincts also screamed that it was because of the way he looked.

Feeling unwelcome would be disconcerting enough on its own, but feeling that it was due to his appearance was what truly affected him.

He couldn’t pinpoint why his instincts thought that, just as he couldn’t pinpoint why they thought he was unwelcome at all. Only they knew that, and who was he to question them?

Police, by contrast, he knew others were cautious around. It was a shared sentiment, one which didn’t leave him marinating in his thoughts, doubting himself and his possible paranoia. A silver lining— collective distrust.

But he was also cautious of much more. Duplicity, for instance.

He had a strange relationship with power and authority. He greatly respected it, when it was true. Promises, contracts, treaties. When kept, they would become true, as would the powers keeping them.

Usually, authority that didn’t keep agreements wouldn’t hold its power for long. There were several loopholes though, particularly when those agreements only affected Others.

Sam could never get used to the insistence of that as a good thing. It didn’t happen often, but now and then he’d stumble across such an opinion. He saw discussions framing Indigenous peoples as relics of the past, along with arguments barely recognizing their humanity.

English or Spanish, Others didn’t matter.

So what did matter?

Thanksgiving, certainly. Football mascots and team names. Portrayals of savagery. Manifest destiny. Pipelines and deforestation. Undisclosed experimentation. Assimilation.

In his eyes, he’d assimilated as much as someone possibly could without consciously trying. He’d grown up in an environment which forced his assimilation in order to survive. He imagined most people would assimilate in those circumstances.

By the time he fully grasped the concept, there wasn’t much he could do about it in either direction. He’d already assimilated too much to ever detach himself, while also recognizing that any further attempts would prove useless.

He was who he was, and in his particular case, it showed.

Years later, he was living in a city where people who resembled him were few and far between, and had once heard a little girl describe him as ‘colorful’ to her parents— because when given the choice between Black or white, she lacked the word to describe his very existence.

He looked back on it fondly. She’d tried her best with the words she had, and he knew that words, even the simplest, could be difficult to make oneself understood in.

Sam knew about racism’s various forms across North and South American societies, just as he knew KnifeliX had no way of knowing that from his story alone. That was fine.

Or it would be, if KnifeliX hadn’t stated assumptions and accusations as if they were facts, all while pressuring Sam to answer for himself.

He felt his head pound as he read KnifeliX’s message again. The idea of ignoring it was extremely tempting, but he decided to give KnifeliX the benefit of the doubt.

With heavy eyelids and a heated forehead, he started typing.

**Locus:  
** **Your concerns are understandable. My promise to you is that they’re unnecessary. There’s no correlation between the way I present topics in my stories and the way I actually think of them.**

As soon as he was done, he retreated to bed and attempted to sleep his headache away.

* * *

His dreams were unpleasant, but not as unpleasant as KnifeliX’s continued correspondence.

The third message asked why he’d opted for brutality rather than consent. It suggested Sam must have underlying self-hate, then finished by declaring his story unjustifiable.

Sam’s stomach twisted and his headache made a triumphant return. He had no idea where to even begin addressing the message, and sat in stunned silence for a long time.

Finally, thoughts emerged from the grainy static of his mind.

Sam had flaws. He acknowledged most of them, occasionally to the point of extremes. None of his flaws were related to his ethnicity, however. For all his self-doubt, he’d never once lapsed into self-hate of that sort. He’d never felt that it was warranted.

Instead, reworking his story’s premise into a consensual one left a bad taste in his mouth for entirely different reasons. After all the musing KnifeliX’s messages had pushed him to do, the mere suggestion of having the policeman consensually fuck his fictional counterpart was borderline insulting.

It felt fundamentally _wrong_ , like a story about the love between a feral cat and a member of the local bird population. Similarly, a story about the cat killing and eating the bird in voyeuristic detail would also feel wrong, but not in the same disingenuous way.

It had to be rape. If Sam was writing it, it had to be rape. Let someone else write the Thanksgiving fairy tale version.

He glared at the message, then decisively clicked away from it.

* * *

As much as he tried to distract himself, KnifeliX’s accusations kept ricocheting through his mind, leaving gaping, bleeding wounds in their wake.

Sam had to wonder if that had been KnifeliX’s goal all along.

Were those messages _intended_ to disrupt his mental faculties, perhaps in an effort to shame him into compliance? Was he ruining everything by refusing to accept KnifeliX’s condemnation as the sole truth of the situation?

And why was he giving KnifeliX’s messages so much time and energy, when all they did was question the parts of himself he’d long accepted?

He knew why he wrote about the things he did, just as well as he knew why he didn’t. He was conscious of the realities his stories drew upon, and he was conscious of the limited impact they could ever hope to achieve.

A person who read them would know what to expect. A person who read them wouldn’t be swayed from their existing moral views, whether positive or negative.

KnifeliX’s messages didn’t merit further contemplation.

Except that, having started, Sam couldn’t stop. It felt as if KnifeliX had broken down a dam and left him helpless against the ensuing tide. He was drowning in his own essence. It made no difference that he’d been through the self-examination process before. All at once, with nothing to hold it back? The clearest spring’s waters were as efficient as the murkiest swamp’s.

There was only so much self-reflection a person could be forced to do without—

Sam leaned back in his seat with a sigh. The day had passed him by, and he had nothing to show for it but a pounding headache and general melancholy. Going to bed was unlikely to help him much, but lying down and shutting his eyes would be a welcome respite all the same.

Minutes later, he was sprawled atop his bed, covers haphazardly pulled up to his chest. The light was off and his eyes were gradually adjusting to the darkness. They kept opening regardless of how many times he shut them.

He tossed and turned and stared at the ceiling, then finally opted for the practical approach.

As he slid his hands under his clothes, a fantasy began playing out in his mind. It was one of several fantasies he could always fall back on, guaranteed to carry him to the brink and push him over it.

He supposed he was lucky. He’d always known what he liked, a goal which took other people a lot of soul-searching—and in some cases, self-hate—to achieve. But although he’d been at that goal to start with, he understood their struggle.

Did he actively relish his fascination for the unconventional, for things deemed strange or immoral? Not really. He didn’t think most people would choose to be fascinated with things they’d be condemned for.

But Sam’s entire existence was made up of things he’d be condemned for, so he’d gotten used to looking inward and taking what pleasures he could in life.

His fantasies were one such pleasure, though they brought their own set of complications. Namely, the Otherness that came with them.

Most facets of Sam’s Otherness were commonplace. He could easily find people like him in one respect or another, and commiserate over their shared experiences. Nearly every component of his identity had been widely discussed in the public sphere, and whether positive or negative, he knew society’s feelings towards each.

For a long time, he wasn’t sure that anyone else in the world shared his fantasies.

They’d started from an early age, early enough that he’d lacked the knowledge to understand them. Media occasionally caught his attention in unusual ways, but it wasn’t until years later that he spotted the patterns.

Like everyone else, he played pretend and had an imaginary friend. Unlike everyone else, his idea of playing pretend involved a lot of tossing himself around, as if shoved by some invisible force. That’s where his imaginary friend came in.

As Sam aged, so did his interests. They morphed and expanded, and it wasn’t long before he realized one basic rule: Certain things weren’t talked about. The rule didn’t apply to everyone, but when it came to him and his interests, it did.

At best, interests that deviated from the norm were cause for ridicule. At worst, they were equated to a degeneracy of character, often to disastrous consequences.

People who shared Sam’s interests learned not to speak of them. It took years for him to realize he wasn’t alone, because for people like him, what was enjoyed in the bedroom wasn’t ever meant to be discussed outside of it.

The thought snapped him back to the present, lying in bed with his hands dragging over his skin. He was supposed to have been indulging in one of his fantasies, not dwelling on the past. But how could he help it? Everything was interconnected, and now he couldn’t even masturbate in peace.

Sam growled under his breath and renewed his efforts. He brushed a hand over his forming erection and thought of his ideal partner. Someone to control and dominate him, someone to put him in his place. Someone to break him down and mold him to their will.

As eager as he’d be to give himself over to a person like that, he couldn’t deny the appeal of being forced to.

Rape fantasies were a bit of a paradox, one which Sam had done his fair share of research on. It led him to the discovery of other types of fantasies, ones all the more taboo for their continued basis in reality. Porn of oppressors and those they oppressed. Real world violence sexualized for a captive audience.

It should’ve been easy to point at the members of that audience and declare them menaces to society, utterly lacking in morals and taste. Sam _wished_ it were that easy, as it’d certainly have cut down on all his moral philosophizing.

But as it turned out, many of that audience’s members were reflected in the taboo porn, sexualizing their own experiences in an effort to... Sam wasn’t sure. Answers ranged from straightforward to highly complex.

In a way, those fantasies were no different from their standard counterparts. Regular rape fantasies, free of any added taboo dynamics, could be described in much the same way. They were based on real world violence that was largely perpetuated by one group against another.

There were studies estimating that most women had, at least once in their life, fantasized about rape. As someone who wasn’t a woman, he didn’t quite fit into that statistic, but it was the one he found most interesting.

Although exceptions existed, the vast majority of rape was inflicted upon women. And yet, many of them fantasized about it.

Sam couldn’t begin to wrap his mind around that, but he understood.

One moment, he could be recoiling at a rape scene playing out on TV, and the next, he could be in his bed, imagining himself at the center of it. In that same way, he regularly crafted fantasies around scenarios that he otherwise found deeply disturbing.

But rape, by its very definition, was unwanted. No matter how much he or any woman fantasized about the act, they were still susceptible to it.

He, at any point in his life, could be brutalized by police.

His hands stilled.

It took some effort, but after a few breaths, his mind was clear again. He kicked his bed cover down and pulled off his clothes, determined to secure an orgasm. Within seconds, he’d transported himself back to his fantasy and took his erection in hand, pumping slowly. His other hand reached lower, massaging his testicles in time with his pumps.

The person in his fantasy had bound him—

Restrained him—

Handcuffed him.

He spread his legs and moved his hand lower, fingers teasing over his perineum. His pumps turned into strokes.

The fantasy continued with his captor closing in, all predatory movements and hungry words. Sam couldn’t be sure what they intended to do with him, only that they were free to do it and he was powerless to fight back.

His fingers firmly prodded at his perineum, complementing the rhythm of his strokes. Together, the two sensations eased his body, and in their midst, his mind wandered.

In sixth grade, his teacher had called him ‘weird’ to his face. He knew it hadn’t been a compliment, but he didn’t know if it had been an insult either.

In ninth grade, the whole class had laughed when he mispronounced the word ‘sew’. He remembered it whenever he heard the word.

His own grandfather had disapproved of his mother’s looks and social standing.

KnifeliX had said there was no justification for Sam’s story, but Sam hadn’t been hoping for there to be, just as he hadn’t been hoping for there not to be.

His story just _was_.

He wasn’t making a grand statement with it, and he doubted its presence on an erotica site lent credence to the contrary. Similarly, he doubted KnifeliX had understood him at any point during their correspondence, or even made a genuine effort to.

Frankly, Sam couldn’t bring himself to care. KnifeliX didn’t have to understand him or read his story. No one had to.

But it was there for anyone who did, like Sam.

Physically, he sensed his orgasm approaching, but mentally, he’d drifted too far away to ever come back in time. His motions were frantic, and in a last-ditch effort, he visualized himself on his knees, held in place by a cock in his ass and a boot on his face.

His muscles clenched. A tremor ran through him as he twitched in his grip and choked out a gasp, pleasure seizing his body at last.

In the wake of his orgasm, he lay there panting, thoughts slowly returning.

Was he a bad person?

He didn’t think so. At least, he hoped not.

He felt strongly about the world’s many injustices. On rare occasions, when the opportunity for him to make a difference arose, he took it. Most of the time, there wasn’t much he could do. Other times, he spoke up to the point of upsetting the people around him.

He didn’t mean to do that, but he also refused to stay silent when the act of speaking up, even to one person—sometimes _especially_ to one person—could make a difference.

People being judged for who they were instead of what they did. People getting forcibly removed from places they’d always belonged in. People shunned and stigmatized.

His whole life, injustices played out around the world. They’d played out before he was born, and they’d probably keep playing out after his death.

It was a reality he didn’t like dwelling on.

But did none of that matter? Because he dared to think the unthinkable and put it out into the world, hoping that it might reach someone like him? Because he dared to consider the tragedy of his circumstances with anything but a lasting, heartfelt sorrow? Because KnifeliX knew him better than he knew himself, and determined there was no place for a minority who couldn’t even behave how they were meant to?

The more Sam thought about it, the more sense it made. After all, why _would_ there be a place for him?

He was an Other.

* * *

**Locus:  
** **I’m under no obligation to seek your approval. I’m doing this for me.**

**Author's Note:**

> haha check _this_ out— *fuses with sam*


End file.
